Nonequilibrium thermodynamic models and applications to hydrogen plasma

A generalized multithermal equilibrium (GMTE) thermodynamic model is developed and presented with applications to hydrogen. A new chemical equilibrium equation for GMTE is obtained without the ensemble temperature concept, used by a previous MTE model. The effects of the GMTE model on the derivation and calculation of the thermodynamic, transport, and radiative properties are presented and significant differences from local thermal equilibrium (LTE) and two temperature model are discussed. When the electron translational temperature (Te) is higher than the translational temperature of the heavy particles, the effects of hydrogen molecular species to the properties are significant at high Te compared with LTE results. The density variations of minor species are orders of magnitude with kinetic nonequilibrium at a constant electron temperature. A collisional-radiative model is also developed with the GMTE chemical equilibrium equation to study the effects of radiative transfer and the ambipolar diffusion on the population distribution of the excited atoms. The nonlocal radiative transfer effect is parameterized by an absorption factor, which is defined as a ratio of the absorbed intensity to the spontaneous emission coefficient